Teachers - My two friends who are both teachers,
Fi and Liz, seem to be the most affected by current
events. It must be painful to encounter the ingnorance and
hope of the schoolyard teaching our youth who have no
perspective of what happened.

diaries - mbp and
sethcohn both aptly summing up the past 24
hours as the dust settles. Another diary caught my eye
with the mention of the word PEACE, it was certainly
shattered on Tuesday and shocked the world. The world
needs leadership toward it, currently peace is only a
luxury to those who can afford it.

The United Nations seemingly is our last best hope for
that currently but given that even affluent countries such
as Australia, who are signatories on the Declaration of
Human Rights, can afford to ignore it (with respect to
recent asylum seekers) and countries such as the United
States of America refusing to sign up to treatries on the
use and prohibition of landmines for domestic political
reasonings, where are the right thinking men of the world?

The Most Isolated Capital City In The World -
Living in Perth provides an interesting and detached
perspective on world events. Perth is closer to another
country than to our nations capital. I was out having a
few drinks with friends to celebrate my recent graduation
at my local tavern when someone came in and implored us to
turn the television on. My friends and the other people
their just stood there in shock at the footage that was
appearing on the screen. Some of us quite visibly shaken.
A comparision I heard today is that this will be a defining
moment for our generation akin to the assasination of JFK
or the Munich Olympics and we'll ask each other where we
were it happened.

What makes it even more touch home is that we know
people via at most 1 or 2 degrees of separation that were
in the Manhattan area when the collapse happened. It
makes me extremely thankful for the quality of life that we
have here and my thoughts go out to those more directly
affected. Perth is so remote from anywhere useful apart
from a submarine base that it makes it an unattractive
target and that our tallest building (50+ stories) is
rather than a monument to capitalism it more to its
failures and excesses.

The media frenzy is reminiscent of the Gulf War but
without the anticipation. I hope we don't see Fortress
America come into existance, that would be a very sad
thing.

Graduation - in approximately 17 days.
Confidence is high, I repeat, Confidence is high. I'm
kind of missing study and/or a significant other to
regulate my life - my days seem very full and unable to
get some quality time to myself (or more importantly catch
up on my pile of books to read). How do other people
balance their lives between work, life and hacking? For
example I want to spend some time of Reefknot but other
things are distracting me or taking up my time.

random hacking - the UCC mail server decided to
eat its hard disk so I've spent my spare time over the
last couple of days resurrecting it's mail config -
including some custom patches for local features to
Mailman. Likes my xmms-cdread hack I must get around to
submitting both upstream.

Home, Sweet, Home - we have way too many
computers in the house, approx 15 at last count....

RFT - Terracon is over for another year, RFT went
well. RFT may or may not be a radio station in the style of
Radio Goodies, yes, meglomaniacs are welcome! Had a
reasonably large collection of mp3s (5+7+2+9 = ~23G), using
dbmix to do
computerised mixing, xmms and a reasonably hacking
xmms-cdread plugin (the hack basically was - it didn't do
CDDA off SCSI cdroms correctly - hacked it to use the
cdparanoia backend and another hack to not constantly read
the table of contents off the CD whilst stopped).
(Although part of me wonders what Debian 1 would have been
like...)

University - It's looking as though I'll pass
Vision, 33/40 in the lab work, only need 17 for the exam -
average is 34.1 for the exam so the probabilities are with
me, should find out in a couple of days

Home, Sweet, Home - Have ISDN at home, much
goodness, stereo in a rack, now just to get the level of
crap down...

Work - New office and desk of power(tm), already
feeling more productive.

Hacking - I might even get some of that done in
the next fortnight, wish me luck ... damn life conspiring
against me :)

University - So long and thanks for all the fish
... finished my last exam today, hopefully forever, but
I'm not counting my chickens just yet. Hopefully this
means I'll be more useful in the global scheme of things
but ...

Home, Sweet, Home - Still needs to be cleaned as
we have only just moved in, crap still everywhere. We've
already re-arranged the computers three times though....